Our website uses cookies throughout our system and to help us provide a better service. Continue to use the site as normal if you're happy with this, or click here to change your settings

Mountain Writing Competition

Entries for the 2024 Mountain Writing Competition will open on 18 January 2024.

Every year Mountaineering Scotland invites people to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – to put into writing their experience of the hills and mountains.

The Mountaineering Scotland Mountain Writing Competition is open to anyone living in the UK, and entries can be fact or fiction, with categories for prose and poetry, just so long as the subject matter has a connection with any aspect of mountaineering, rock climbing, walking or ski mountaineering / ski-touring.

And for the 2024 competition, we are introducing a new youth poetry category for young people aged 11-17.

Entries are assessed by our panel of judges, made up of past competition winners and well-known authors or journalists, and the winning entries published in Scottish Mountaineer Magazine. 

Mountaineering Scotland has encouraged creative mountain writing through the competition since 1987, when the competition was started by the then President, Graham E Little. Past Vice President Ingrid Parker introduced a poetry category in 1997.

How to enter

The coordinator for the annual writing competition is Tommy McManmon.

Tommy is a former winner of the prose section, with People of These Glens in 2012. He lived and worked on Knoydart for over 12 years, during which time he won the Scotsman/Orange Communicator Award for Scottish journalistic writing. He’s recently completed a Masters degree with the Water, Engineering and Development Centre in Loughborough, and now works for the Pentlands Hills Regional Park.

Tommy McManmon

Read the winning entries from the 2022 Mountain Writing Competition.

Find out who won prizes in recent years and read the winning entries here: